


Freedom

by a_t_rain



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Gen, Jackson's Whole, space mafia family values
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27869013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: Erik learns what it means to be the heir.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 57





	Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> I never planned on writing an Erik story, but for some reason, he showed up in my head and wanted to tell his side.
> 
> This is kind of a companion piece to [Loyalty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4314537) and [Ordinary](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6498709), which explore some of the same events from (respectively) Rish's and Topaz's point of view.

“ _I’m_ telling _Ma_ -ma and _you’ll_ get in _trou_ -ble!”

“No, don’t,” pleads Erik, because “trouble” means being banished from their evenings with Mama and Dada and left alone in the nursery, and there’s _never_ enough of Mama and Dada to go around, especially with the new baby. And breaking Pazzy’s brand-new game-console means at least two _weeks_ of trouble, maybe a whole month. It isn’t fair. Mama and Dada can afford a new one – the Baron pays them enough, he’s heard them talking – and it wasn’t like he _meant_ to break it. He was just playing around. “ _Please_ don’t tell. You can borrow mine any time.”

“You said the same thing about your ice skates after you threw one of Roo’s in the pond,” says Pazzy, “and then you hid them under your bed and told her you’d lost them.”

Star must have told her, the little sneak. He should never have trusted Star, but he’s seen that the oddchildren can always trust each other, and he’d figured it ought to work that way for the evens. _That_ isn’t fair, either.

He thinks about a month of evenings alone with only their nanny for company, and is suddenly close to tears. “ _Please_ , Pazzy. I’ll _give_ you mine. Fair and square. No tricks, you can have it right now.”

His oddsister wavers. She looks like she’s about to cry too, because Topaz has always been soft that way. “I … can’t,” she says after a moment. “I’m sorry, Erik. I have to tell.”

* * *

She really does have to tell Mama, he figures out. And Ruby has to. Pearl can’t keep secrets from Mama either, although that might just be because she's four. But with the others, it's definitely something to do with the loyalty treatments they get, the bonding sessions from which he is excluded. He used to be jealous of those afternoons one-on-one with their mother, but now he’s not so sure.

 _Erik_ can keep a secret. He blackmails Roo into giving him her robot puppy after she loses her temper and conks him over the head one day at breakfast, and he gets one of Pazzy’s model smuggling jumpships the same way, and even Pearl’s special blanket. Of course he doesn’t want an old baby blanket, but it’s fun knowing he _can_ get the Jewels to give him stuff and they can't do the same thing back to him. But he does crave the rest of Pazzy’s model fleet, and he figures he’s _scored_ when she tries to hatch sea-snake eggs in the guest bathroom and ends up flooding the place.

And then, Pazzy has an inspiration. “You _can’t_ tell Mama on me,” she says triumphantly. “ _I’m_ going to tell her first.”

And she does, too. She tells _everything_ , and Erik isn’t allowed to join the rest of the family for anything fun until he finally coughs up where he hid the blanket and gives it back to Pearl. And none of the Jewels get in trouble at all, because Mama is always soft on the Jewels, and _that_ isn’t fair either.

* * *

When Erik is older, he learns not to see the Jewels as rivals. Dada starts taking him along when he does business, and the first time, he wonders if he’s about to be loyalty-bonded to Dada. He’s not sure how he feels about that, but at the same time, he’s curious about what it’s like; the Jewels have always been very mysterious about what the treatments involve. But nothing that happens is anything like a treatment. Mostly, it’s just being introduced to the Baron’s tenants, and watching Dada collect the Baron’s cut of their business profits.

The last place they stop is a grubber bar, and here Dada sits down and orders a beer for himself and a mug of hot chocolate for Erik. The bartender would have given them the drinks for free, but Dada insists on paying. Erik doesn’t really understand why. What’s the point of being the Baron’s agent if you can’t get a free drink out of it?

The bar feels dangerous and exciting. Erik can’t see any other children there, or anyone nearly as well-dressed as Dada.

“Are we supposed to be here?” he asks, kind of hoping they aren’t, because that would be more interesting.

“Oh, sure,” says Dada, who seems entirely comfortable here. “I grew up in places like this. Came up from nothing.”

Jackson’s Whole, says Dada, is a great planet, and Erik shouldn’t ever let anyone tell him otherwise. The thing that makes it great is that people have absolute freedom here. If you aren’t free, Dada says, you might know who you are, but you’ll never get to figure out who you might be.

And Erik understands why there aren’t going to be any loyalty treatments for him.

* * *

Later, he also understands that he’s on his own, that _freedom_ means you can’t trust other people who also have freedom. He is the heir, but Star and Pidge and Amiri are coming up behind him and nipping at his heels, and then, when he’s already well into his teens, Mama and Dada go and have _another_ one.

He starts to appreciate Pazzy more as they grow up. She doesn’t bear grudges or try to compete with him, unlike Pidge and Star, and she’s his nearest age-mate, the one who knows him best. Besides, he has come to understand, through Dada’s private talks with him, that she is no threat to him. Dada doesn’t say that in so many words, of course; he just says that Topaz is clever, and will make a good advisor for him, and that after he takes over the House he will need to look after her and the rest of the Jewels for as long as they live. Erik promises that he will.

* * *

Just after Erik’s twentieth birthday, old Baron Cordonah dies and Erik’s parents become the Baron and Baronne in his place; and a year later, they nearly lose the House to the old Baron’s son. Pidge and Star have already been sent off to galactic universities under false identities; the rest of the family has to scramble.

When he comes home, he finds out that Mama has decided to stop the Jewels’ loyalty treatments. Erik tries to calculate how this new factor will affect his future. He doesn’t much like the answer. Not that he has a whole lot of time to think about it; all of his brothers and sisters have too much to tell, and the first day after Erik’s homecoming is given over to talking about their adventures and comparing notes. Erik made it all the way to Zoave Twilight on his own before one of the House couriers caught up with him and told him to go home. The others want to hear all about his journey, especially Topaz. She and Pearl were supposed to go to the Hegen Hub and then board another shuttle to join Pidge, but they’d only gotten as far as the jump-station when Seppe found them.

“But I kind of wanted to keep on going,” she admits to Erik, after the younger ones have finally gone to bed. “I mean – maybe not _forever_ , of course I’d want to come back someday, but I thought maybe _I_ might like to go to university too, and nobody’s ever asked. You can get a whole degree in dance, did you know?”

“You couldn’t really _leave_ , though,” Erik points out. “What about the others?”

“Oh, I know. Just like _you_ probably can’t leave, at least not for long.” The former Baron’s son, who was halfway across the galaxy when his father died, had found that out the hard way. “But do you ever think about it?”

“Yeah,” Erik admits. He’d never say out loud that he sometimes wishes that he weren’t heir to a Great House – especially now that this strange thing has happened with the Jewels – but there are other what-ifs he can talk about. “Like, there were these three guys around our age going to Aslund to work during the harvest season. The farmers pay your passage, and you stay in a bunkhouse like our grubbers do, only the weather’s better on Aslund, and then you get paid after the harvest’s over and you can do whatever you want. They were talking about going trekking in one of the parks there, afterward. They just told me all of this – didn’t care who I was, or anything – and then they asked me if I wanted to join them. And I was thinking I might do it, instead of going on to the rendezvous point like we were supposed to … Mama would go into conniptions, of course, me turning into a grubber. Are you going to tell her?”

Topaz considers, and then Erik watches her come into her freedom. She gives him a sort of half-smile and says, “I guess I won’t.”

And from now on, Erik realizes, it’s going to be all against all. Because that’s what Jackson’s Whole is, and like Dada said, people who have their freedom can be anything here.


End file.
